Tuesday, January 26, 2016

Aspects of AfroFuturism: The Architecture of Impossible Tasks


twenty two minutes full of thoughts. lets see if i caption all of them...

first of all : there is a god. opened the fridge yesterday to a tub of salted real butter. after years of margarine. i was always the one buying butter, always the only one using butter. i mentioned nothing. just praying it continues.

looking out the back door at the yard my eye fell on the neglected fig tree, full of dried bended leaves while a hand struggles to grow in dead, replaced sand dirt. we used to have rich black soil but someone thought buying dirt was an idea and ended up buying shit sand. but i digressed. i wanted to tell you that as i looked at the fig tree, plantain struck me as a memory and then i twisted my head to try and conjure call back what it was...and i remembered. I was dreaming before I woke up. i seemed to have taken some road trip in company? a male? not sure who? but ended up at jack warner's house which aint his real house. and it seems as if the house was really a business compound. there was a taxi company, an insurance company and i dont know what else, and jack ran a coarse, no fluff grocery store. and I had asked for plantain, and he brought me two bust up plantains, and i removed them from my items at the cashier. but we were still friendly. i had asked for limes and what ever he told me seemed like there were few on the tree, he had to get someone to pick, then before i left i had to use the bathroom and it was his wife in the yard took me inside the house past the businesses where she barked at some business owner to let her in her house. it was funny. i remember saying to myself, it is possible to have great personal reliable relationships with people who you do business. and that is all i remember. and that woman was not his real life wife either.

while making tea i hear what appears to be a shit storm of an argument on the radio.. it was the intensity that struck me and i thought of those hens last night..i wonder what they will feel and respond because i also know it was my intensity, seriousness and focus that surprised them, so then it gives me another revelation: i am not the one in a group setting of strangers asking them what to feel, looking for validation for my sentiments and feelings, but I am the one crazy. ok. moving on now

it was funny to hear verna talk about the cadre of people moving up into the laventilled these last few days as ones who never went up in there without security and army. if i am successful in success I will make sure to write on my chest and speak and tell people is three places i am from in trinidad: tortuga, barataria and laventille. the last two collapsed, because the households were basically one: when i was not in tortuga i was in town, between the latter two, when not in barataria, in laventille at my Aunt Lilla's shop, Second Spring Cafe. When I came home for holidays, it was there in that gallery i played Aretha Franklin's Harlem Rose. It is the laventille house that I blanked my older cousin cause she refused me the use of the cafe to build it over and regentrify our home, she shame to no end about the place she born in, i lived all over the world, and want to embrace the place, lift it up and rename it loveuntil. see the upside down nature of things. she living in a house that has not been touched, changed, rebuilt, maintained since its seventy or more year history, it have to be that or longer, i never asked. my uncle from toco built that house for my aunt, he having had to ask my grandfather, her older brother, for her hand in marriage, their parents were dead, and is barataria by felix and maria baptiste, lilla was living. so you understand the closeness of the clan, I come like lilla's first grandchild. i think too if i not mistaken, she was my mother's godmother, but i will have to get confirmation on that. I will tell you one thing though...I was living in michigan, a two am on a Sunday morning , waiting for PBS Masterpiece Theatre to replay, I go to the kitchen to make popcorn, and there is a woman standing at my door, it closed behind her, in a dress like older women wore once upon a time, holding a paint pail like the Annunaki depictions, and would not move. clear as a person. but it wasnt. I was used to spirits by then, my brother having died and never left for thirteen years or so...but i was scared shitless. kept leaving the kitchen and returning. trying to calm myself and remember, do not be afraid of spirits, they come to tell you something, ask them what. I tried three times. then the person left. It was my Aunt Lilla I grew to learn and believe. She had died, and came to visit me on her journey out. Long before anyone in the family told me. That is my Laventille story.

the other thing I wake up thinking...about Afrofuturism - what is it saying? what is it about? i think of it in relation to Eddie's drawings. Is Afrofuturism about theory of living, behavior, future prospects, at all? or just about art, cartoons, superheros and depictions?

i miss the twelve noon news, writing.. totally occupied with the pieces.

i keep thinking of trinis. we are a funny people
when people had power and were in position they did nothing, hired not the people they gave honor and the best accolades to, decades earlier...i shall never forget: "you were not a waste of breastmilk" verna rose told me that at a social development consultation during the time of the pnm. but they have every and all kinna thing to say when they are no longer. but i wont say more, cause i also know sometimes answers only emerge in a timing, not of our own. (side eye)

trying to think of what to gather . what can help us. untangle, disentangle
heart emoticon

Good Tuesday Morning.
it is 12:12

afrofuturism IS the architect of impossible physics.
our tasks are nothing short of
this whole write up is an amalgam of afrofuturistic aspects
From: Edward Bowen's Drawing Series, Architect of Impossible Physics

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